March 2001

• The Mir Station. Its future is bright, I tell ya.
• Signs of an urban spring in Minnesota: cans, peels, behavior reports. The snow is melting and we get to see a whole winter's worth of trash at once.
• Shortage of workers sometimes tied to housing. We're starting to find the same sort of problems here in Minnesota that made housing such a nightmare in the Bay Area. Lovely.
• Lawsuits challenge anonymous speech online. The Internet will be increasingly constrained by lawyers for the wealthy. It was just the other evening that I asked a friend Can I still go to heaven if I kill a lawyer? and got the answer I think it helps.
• Steve Kubby refuses to agree to probation. He won't denounce his beliefs in order to stay out of prison, even though he'll probably die there. His crime? Writing a book (ISBN 1-89362-644-X about medial marijuana, and misdemeanor possession of a mushroom stem and some tiny cactus buttons.
• MacOS X Questions & Answers - So easy to use, it needs a FAQ! And I actually installed the release version last night. I'll be writing up a comparison with an OpenBSD install soon.
• Make Your Own Steve Jobs Keynote!

Weather in Minneapolis for March 30, 2001     March 30 in History

• Fake Fans, Fake Buzz, Real Bucks offers a look at how movie studios are putting up fan sites to draw attention to upcoming movies. Sleazy and perhaps unethical. Would I do it if someone paid? Now there's a trickier question to answer.
• With deception everywhere, Net calls for hierarchy of trust. More on the subject of bad information on the web.
• Attention, Fat Corporate Bastards! We know about your plans for the Internet. Although you won't listen, we would like to point out how wrong you are now, so we can point out gleefully how right we were later.
• The Spam Wars and Questions and Answers with Tim Pozar regarding spam. These came to my attention because Verio is censoring John Gilmore's email [ mirror at http://cryptome.org/verio-censor.htm ]. Verio are the big ISP who have been buying up smaller ISPs. One of them they bought was best.com, which is where some of my stuff is hosted. The Tim Pozar interview is most interesting, but while he makes Brightmail sound good, he ought to. He works there.

• School shooter was a brooding loner. The only good news from the story is that the nuisance was stopped by an armed officer assigned to the school.
• Congress hasn't the authority to dictate the blood-alcohol level for a DWI. Or to blackmail states by threatening to withhold highway dollars. Of course since the feds have already taken our money, they don't see a problem with putting conditions on its distribution. It's ours. We stole it fair and square.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 26, 2001     March 26 in History

• The Internet Archive is building an Internet Library. You have to submit a proposal to use the archive, but once you do, you have access to 43 terabytes of web pages, Usenet postings, and Arpanet documentation.
• Gerald's personal HTTP archive lets you archive all the pages you've surfed. I keep meaning to install it, but haven't gotten around to setting up a machine to serve as a proxy server yet.
• The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook makes the strongest argument I've seen for writing standards-compliant web pages. That, and I really like the FONT trick. After a bit of rummaging around, I got to A Study of Regular Polygons, which seems to use CSS to draw the polygons. Now that's cool.
• Eric Raymond's Sex Tips For Geeks: How To Be Sexy. I don't know what to say.
• The Misanthropic Bitch asks us to Throw away the trash. When everyone dislikes you and picks on you, maybe the problem isn't other people. And shooting up a school to get revenge might not be the best solution to the problem.
• And the April 2001 issue of Scientific American has an article about violence and egotism / self-confidence called Violent Pride, but that's not one of the articles you can get online.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 23, 2001     March 23 in History

• The LED Museum, and most especially its The Punishment Zone have lots of useful information on LED-based flashlights. Nothing specific to a bike headlight, but I've decided that's because nobody is making such a beast.
• The PAL OneStar LED Flashlights sounded tempting enough that I bought one. It's useful as a being seen, but not for actual seeing on a bike. The useful range seems to be about 7 metres. The PAL OneStar review says it's pretty good. Huh. It's also very purplish-blue. I wonder if maybe I got a bad one.
• The CC Expedition review led me to order a CC Expedition - 7 White LED Flashlight. If it's as bright as they say (which I'm starting to doubt, but we'll see), I can almost certainly adapt the head (bulb) from it to make a good driving light. And if you don't want the whole body, you can get just the bulb for about $35.
• The Bicycle Lighting - White LED Light page tells you how to build your own. And their Bicycle Lighting - Driving Lights page has a number of useful links.
• The Action Electronics LightWave 2000 looked promising.
• The HDD Systems Action Light has the drawback of requiring special (expensive, non-rechargable) batteries. Other than that, it looks like an option.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 21, 2001     March 21 in History

• On a website note, I've started making the first steps toward keeping the server from falling over so often (and if you haven't noticed, it's because I've been manually rebooting it a lot). Unfortunately, this is going to mean not only new software to serve the pages (goodbye Manila), but also a new OS, new hardware, and lots of other hassles. The content may be thinner during the transition, and I just wanted to warn you now.
• I'm also searching for a ready-built LED-based bicycle headlight. I'm looking for something that will actually illumate dark roads, as opposed to just letting me be seen. It seems to be nearly an impossible request to fill. Anyone out there have any suggestions? There's a lot of raw parts listed on the LEDs with Punch! and Bicycle Lighting - LED Lights pages, but neither has pointed me to just what I'm looking for.
• Colin Peterson marches to his own beat, on statge and in politics. It's a profile of one of the blue dog democrats from MN.
• The All Your Base Are Belong to Us History. I avoided pointing to it for a long time, but now that the whole history is available, I guess it's time.
• In My Word's Worth - finding your place, Marylaine Block explores that undefined I need SOMETHING feeling.
• Reasons it's good to be a man has been on my HD for years. I figured it was time to share. Also The Corporate Zodiac.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 19, 2001     March 19 in History

• A Minnesota state Panel approves photo-cop. Bastards.
• Wanna buy some guns? The ROSOBORONEXPORT Web Site will sell them to you... if you're a small country. Heck you can even get a sub or Ka-50 Combat Helicopter. Just pony up the hard currency. Oh, and turn off JavaScript before trying to get to the site, since they enforce their crappy frames using JavaScript. Bleh.
• Irish workers are most stress-free in Europe because they work the most hours. Then again, it might have something to do with the Guinness.
• It's the law in Kennesaw - every head of household is required to own at least one firearm with ammuntion in Kennesaw, GA. And strangely enough, the crime rate dropped by 89% following the law's passage, compared to 10% for the rest of the state.
• Doctor suing McDonald's for $4.5 million. Seems there was a syringe in his Big Mac. Eww!
• Did you know that Taking Viagra can make you go blind? And get hairy palms? Okay. I made that last bit up.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 16, 2001     March 16 in History

• Bill's Excellent Adventure is part 1 of a five-part series about Bill Gates, done by the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Unspeakably Stupid Stories might offer you a moment or two of giggling.
• A Minnesota farmer uses manure to make electricity. In farming... if you're not an environmentalist, you're not going to be successful.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 12, 2001     March 12 in History

• I've updated my Downtown Minneapolis pictures with more winter images. Now with snow!
• Sisters Camelot is a local mobile organic food kitchen. They got some press (though not the type you'd hope for) in the City Pages article Dark Days for Camelot and Mob Rule in Minneapolis, Part 2.
• RMS wrote The GNU GPL and the American Way in response to the much- ballyhooed comments from Microsoft's Jim Allchin.
• Soft spots remain in Apple's new OS. I'll say.
• Southerners cotton to car racing. Specifically they get the fact that driving a car at 180mph on a crowded track is dangerous.
• Excessive code and excessive nudity. What gives? and The Architects of Porn seem to fit together well.
• Found a cute little story about an Exhausted but happy guinea pig.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 9, 2001     March 9 in History

• Are your politics hurting someone? is a question asked by Bureaucrash. Then again, maybe it's just a front run by the FBI to identify malcontents.
• Neighbor states bear the brunt of Minnesota trash. Sigh. Seems we're not building any more landfills in MN. Good for our environment. Not so good for Wisconsin or Iowa.
• Wisconsin issues new fish consumption advisory. Pretty much all of the lakes have enough mercury to be a problem if you eat a lot of fish. Sigh. Probably related to the previous article, too.
• TVLand puts Mary Tyler Moore on a pedestal - in Minneapolis.
• And in more local news, Former Gov. Harold Stassen dies at 93. He was also a perennial presidential candidate.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 5, 2001     March 5 in History

• I Added Leftover Pie and Fast Fish and Cheese Risotto to Dave's Recipes.
• Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. A bit more realistic than expecting to learn Java in 7 days. And it fits in very well with the Apprentice Education article I linked to a while back.
• Face it - They're watching you. Pick a three-letter government agency. Lots of fodder for conspiracy theorists here.
• Do you have Digital Dementia? The author thinks it could replace Road Rage as a staple on the nightly news.
• Is it Time to buy a used server? Good thing Apple didn't ever really crack the server market, or their stock would fall to 5 on this sort of news.
• Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, SEC Nemesis - the 14 year-old who got busted by the SEC. Turns out all he was doing was what most analysts do.
• What is it with women, The loo and love? The article chronicles some behavior that's had me confused and bemused for years. But then, I'm a guy and not supposed to get this sort of thing, I guess.

Weather in Minneapolis for March 2, 2001     March 2 in History